NEIL
My school days were long past, but they still rode me hard, revisiting when I least expected them, or perhaps when I was least able to handle the memories. I was deep in a sump well below Castleton when something triggered my memories and switched on the classic fear/flight responses. It took me several minutes to put them back behind their wall, as I lay in the cold and dark, seeing and hearing the other boys as they threw whatever they had learned from their parents at me. Thank god I was always so much bigger than they were at all ages. Sticks and stones would never break my bones, but what I understood of their words still bloody hurt.

Darkness. My regulator bubbling away; if I turned my head torch back on, the bubbles would show me the way up. The way out, though, was down, through the unoriginally named Cheese Press squeeze and then up to the Organ Loft before the wriggle out after the U-Bend. I checked my dry bag for the umpteenth time, and by ‘umpteenth’ I mean forty third. Two tethers: one to the dry bag, the other to my tanks. This was a long passage, so I was double tanking, and the Organ Loft was my only chance to change tanks above water, as well as to get some decent shots of the rock formations. All I needed to do was to get through the squeeze, which meant extending an arm first so that my shoulders could follow, and then breathe in…

The photos came out even better than I had hoped, both colour and monochrome, and I filed the reels away for later printing. The chiaroscuro effects in The Organ Loft had been extremely satisfying, even though I had been panting so hard after my first tank had run out as I cleared the Cheese Press. I had to hold my breath for a little bit until I got my body through the squeeze and then finned to that fragile division between water and air pocket. And breathe.

Two nights after the pictures showed themselves to me, the Robbins Gallery had their show, and that was where my life changed.

MADELEINE
Leo was so bloody insistent, as he always was.

“Mads, for fuck’s sake! Your stuff is great. How many times do I have to say that? Do you want to make a fucking sale or not? Let me send some of your stuff in”

“And if they don’t want to buy? Monochrome is hardly coffee-table, is it?”

“I thought you didn’t care about that sort of thing?”

“I care about my earnings”

“A point with which I can’t argue, much as I would be concerned with my commission. Look, let me pick what I think will be their sort of thing. And please: just go down to the show as well, smile nicely, or try to, do your best, and see what happens. Please. Your pictures should sell themselves, to be honest”

“Do you really think that?”

Leo huffed, then looked directly at me.

“Bloody well yes. That set from the old church, just as an example, absolutely. I want to send some of them to that editor. And that’s why I want you at the show. Customers just need a face, something to give them focus. Let them know who the artist is”

I snorted.

“A tranny?”

He winced.

“And do you need to tell people as soon as you meet them?”

I decided to avoid the explanation of how our lords and masters defined ‘sex by deception’ and set off home. My scooter ran faultlessly, the Jade Garden supplied some tastiness, and my bed was all I needed.

Yes, I went to the show, and yes, I sent, no risk, no chance of my old school friends, etc, some of my more personal shots. I didn’t have my face in them, so, as my thoughts went, I would be safe. I had used a camera behind a cheval glass set up so that what I saw in the mirror was pretty much what the camera was getting. I cheated now and again, using a digital set-up and a simple photo-editing suite, but that was purely to move the image in the frame, crop boundaries and so on. Film was the way, the truth and the whatever, but what I really thought, in essence, was that if I saw myself as an artist I needed my medium to be physical, even if it all to do with light.

The show surprised me in how many potential customers it drew, especially for a mid-week event. Leo was an irritating tick, forever pushing me forward to speak to people, despite his comments about my pictures selling themselves.

He had hissed at me when he saw how I was dressed, and as it was a pretty regular conversation between the two of us, I knew exactly what he meant.

“Hell, Mads! A bit more effort next time?”

“Leo, one: I travel on a bike. Two: high heels bloody hurt when you stand in them for too long. And it’s due to rain later”

“Well, you could at least try. Anyway, get out and mingle. Be that face, okay?”

I scanned the small crowd, looking for the usual archetypes and weighing up which ones to approach, and oh dear: my regular bank worker was staring at one of my nudes. Break up the flow of her thoughts before she managed the arithmetic.

“Hello, Clare”

“Oh, hi, Maddy! These are… Very arty!”

“Um, sort of the point”

“The shadows are the thing that caught my eye. You can’t see anything, you know, rude, but you know it’s there. Right tease, that is. Who’s the model?”

Me, in my bedroom.

“An amateur. I work with her a lot. She hasn’t really got the face for portrait stuff”

“Pity! The men will just have to imagine her”

“Why ‘men’, Clare?”

“Well, boobs and bums, right? Seen that bloke over there in the leather jacket? REALLY staring at your stuff. Just hope he keeps his hands out of his pockets”

“Sorry?”

“Pocket billiards?”

“Oh, for… I am going to try and forget you said that”

He was a big man, with an awful haircut and clearly unfamiliar with the concept of an iron from the state of his trousers, but the bike boots he was wearing absolutely gleamed. Clare watched as he moved along the exhibition, muttering phrases like ‘Hand shandy/ as he stared intently at each image, almost unblinking. I turned to look at her.

“Clare, my love, if he is doing what you suspect, he has some very odd ideas about erotica. That section is all pictures of an old church”

She sniggered, whispered the single word “Organs!”, and moved off to look at my colour work. I was still curious, though, so I walked over to the man I was thinking of as Mister Happy Camper, as he was so clearly intent.

“Are you looking to buy?”

It was like one of those cartoons, where a character literally jumps out of their skin, and as he turned towards me looking almost terrified I revised my opinion on Clare’s suspicions. Press on, woman. Perhaps he’ll bugger off.

“What do you think of my work?”

“The photography’s really good I like monochrome work the photographer should have put up more information it doesn’t say what camera or what the lens was or the exposure time of how it was lit or the film speed”

That is how it sounded, as if seven or eight sentences had simply lost all punctuation. Deep breath, and forget about monomanualism. He was clearly somewhere on that famous scale, which was a pity, because he was at least four inches taller than my five foot eleven and had absolutely gorgeous eyes.

I pulled myself up sharply. Where on Earth had that thought tunnelled out from? He was staring intently at one of my church pictures as he pulled a fondleslab from his rucksack, swiping at its face a few times before holding it up in an obvious comparison with my image rather than what I had suspected. My hands were already half way up to stop him pirating my work, but he was absolutely intent once more. I took a step to one side so that I could see what he was looking at on his device, and it turned out to be a picture of some really intricate rock formations.

“Are those stalactites?”

“Yes and stalagmites it is in a cave under Castleton in the Peak District but in the White Peak which is limestone and…”

He proceeded to pour out an absolute torrent of information, until I held up a hand before his face. That was when he smiled, suddenly becoming human.

“I am talking too much, aren’t I? I am sorry but it is the way I am and my Mum said----. Breathe, Neil. Count… My name is Neil. I take photos. This one is in a cave. It’s called The Organ Loft and is between two sumps”

A memory I didn’t know I had of some passage from a book tugged at my arm.

“Sumps? You mean underwater, don’t you?”

“Yes. There is a narrow part just before that one, called the Cheese Press. That’s why I have to use tethered bottles”

“You are talking about cave diving, aren’t you? Underwater, in the dark?”

Another human emotion emerged, and it was puzzlement.

“Of course. There’s no other way of getting there”

I shook my head, shuddering at the thought of what he was describing so casually, and changed the subject, or rather reverting to his original word deluge.

“Well, I’m Maddy Gibson, and this is sort of my show. The camera I used on that one was a…”

NEIL
The exhibition had been advertised for some seven weeks or so, but I had never heard of the photographer, a Madeleine Gibson. I wasn’t sure if they would be happy seeing my usual bike boots on their clean carpet, so I spent a couple of hours cleaning them before I set out. It was within walking distance, so I could have used other footwear, but neither trainers nor walking boots were really appropriate, which just left dress shoes, and they would have been silly paired with my chinos. It was also due to rain later that evening, and I didn’t want to soak my best shoes.

What had caught my eye were the sample images on the internet advert, showing a few monochrome pics as well as one utterly lurid shot of red wisps in mid-air, which I simply couldn’t fathom. Entry was free, with a ticket. I suspected that was simply to control numbers at the event. I walked in, showed my ticket, and started to work my way along the display. Unfortunately, what I really wanted wasn’t there: some description of kit and settings.

I really hate auto settings on a camera. The manufacturers always call it something like ‘best pic’ or ‘magic’ or something like that, and what can be meant by ‘best’ can vary from image to image. In fact, there can be several ‘best’ settings for each shot, as one setting will emphasise an aspect while others bring out different ones. A bit like Warhol’s prints, each in a different shade but using the same base image.

I had to look closely at the first few, which were classic chiaroscuro work, before I could work out what was actually in the frame. I eventually realised it was the edge of a naked shoulder and a hip, lit somehow, or perhaps edited, to achieve a very sharp separation of light and dark. There were a few of those, a couple with a hint of a breast, but never a face, even in silhouette.

The next shot almost made me gasp, for it was of a large pipe organ, obviously in a church, and the shot had been taken from below the level of the organist’s seat. It was so reminiscent of my own pic of---

“What do you think of my work?”

I nearly shat myself, but managed to hold back the yelp. The speaker was a tall woman, with quite a smooth contralto voice.

“Well, I take my own pictures, and I like working in monochrome. What I would have been interested in is some info about the kit and settings”

I took my tablet computer from my rucksack, calling up the scans of my shots in The Organ Loft. Yes! Almost exactly the same angle in each picture, looking upwards at the pipes and stalactite/stalagmite pillars, foreshortening them to make them seem even bigger, the shiny metal of the organ pipes reflecting almost as strongly as the wet limestone.

The woman had moved behind me, which was a little worrying, but I realised she wanted to see my own picture.

“Are those stalactites?”

“Yes. And stalagmites”

I was partway through a proper explanation, when my number alarm kicked in. How many words had I said? Breathe, Neil.

I worked a smile onto my face, apologised for my verbosity and introduced myself, before explaining where my photo had been taken, and how I had got there. Predictably, she was one of far too many people who simply don’t understand the delights of cave diving. I let her change the subject, back to photography, and ‘Maddy, as she introduced herself, gave me a proper package of info on kit, settings and why she liked monochrome work just as much as I did.

It was odd, really weird. Talking to women, or rather girls when I was at school, had been impossible, their thoughts so orthogonal to my own, along with the regular taunts of ‘Spacky Stracky’. Maddy was different, even though I kept missing some fine detail because I was word-counting to avoid gushing.

She left me with a piece of paper bearing the gallery’s e-mail.

“Your work is excellent, Neil. Leo—he’s the owner here—he might be able to get you some sales”

She was gone, off to chat with other potential customers, I suppose, and I walked home with paid-for copies of the organ and ‘shoulder and hip’ pictures. Had she been her own model? How?

MADDY
‘Neil’ left early, having spoken to nobody but me, as far as I could tell, and to Leo as he bought a couple of prints. What an odd man; so clearly on that spectrum, but when he smiled, oh my. I wondered what technique he was using to bring himself back into focus, as well as trying to predict whether he would end up like me, using Leo to punt out his work for filthy lucre.

Filthy lucre would have been fine by me, but thus far all I was getting was merely slightly smutty. That thought brought me a reminder of Clare’s suspicions re his relaxation in a gentlemanly manner. After I had stopped chuckling, I reminded myself that I was very unlikely to see him again, but resolved to keep an eye out for his own work. His eye for composition was superb, and he clearly loved chiaroscuro at least as much as I did. Never mind, woman. What will be will be, and probably not as good as hope was saying.

It rained all the way home, and despite the leg screens on my dinky bike, I got soaked. Clothes off and into the washing machine ready for the next load, warm shower, mug of hot chocolate and into bed in a very worn old nighty to browse a bit of interweb while I warmed up.

Sod it… I typed in ‘Neil cave diver’ and then tried to remember some other words. Oh yes: Cheese Press and Organ Loft.

He only had his own bloody website. Neil Strachan Photography held a fascinating collection of images, although I skipped past the ones involving crash-helmeted heads turned sideways in narrow fissures that were far too far underground for me ever to want closer acquaintance. There were others, though, and some of them were stunning. One set took me a little while to work out, and then realisation made me almost yelp with delight.

It was a small stream, clearly somewhere mountainous, and as the stream had chuckled along, cold air had frozen the water splashes, so that he had caught several flower heads looking as if they had been coated in glass. Best of all were a few small rocks. The same process had sheathed them in ice, but as what was clearly a warmer sun had heated them, the ice shells had sagged away from them, so that a perfect transparent cast hung at an angle before each one. He had an amazing eye for detail, and I stayed up gar later than I had intended, until I realised there was far too many images for me to get through in one go. Reluctantly I closed my laptop, leaving the washing up for the next day, and settled down for the night.

I worked through the site in easy stages, trying to do justice to each image, and yes: Mr Strachan had attached a full list of metrics to each shot. He might be---no. He clearly WAS obsessed with the detail, but he was bloody good at his work. I was almost jealous. Or should that be envious?

Three weeks after the event was when I nearly died.